Travis Marvin

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1 star for visual effects, the other for the actors, both tried their best but there's only so much you can do for a movie with such awful dialog, pacing, and general direction. I honestly don't even care about the ripped off scenes, it can be said that taking from other sources, especially many different ones, can make for a good story if you do something new with them, use them to tell your own story. But they're not used for anything at all here, even a straight rip off might've been more entertaining but instead we get an endless series of loosely connected beats with no connection to eachother, characters whose thoughts and feelings flip completely from one sentence to the next as necessary to create brief scene they were needed for. This is a movie directed like a long series of trailer clips, pretending to be a story, it can't really rip anything off because it's nothing. I feel bad for the people whose careers are surely damaged by their involvement with them, these actors have been made to look bad even in cases they're not because the dialog written for them is so nonsensical and disconnected, they can't possibly play characters that don't even exist in concept. Zack Snyder should find new work as an idea guy in the writing room that reminds people cool scenes exist, leave writing and directing to people who could write two paragraphs without undermining the character in it.

2 of the 3 stars I'm giving it are for production quality alone. It was a beautiful film, the creatures and ships and fight scenes all looked great, the style hit pretty well for me, I liked all the actors. It would've been a decent sidestory movie in the Star Wars franchise, a little isolated mid-outer rim story. I could've even ignored the clear inspiration and accepted it as clearly inspired but with potential. Where it fails is dialog and character writing, none of the characters seem to really have any thoughts or motivation, they say and feel whatever they need to to serve the scene, instead of the scenes serving the characters. In the middle of the conversation someone can shift like they've suddenly gone through an entire character arc and everyone around them rolls with it, it was consistently jarring to me and made it hard to care about them at all. This exaggerates the obviousness of the plot direction and "twist" because I can only think of their actions in terms of what will bring about action and drama, it was more shocking to me that it was treated as a twist at all by the characters when it was so clearly set up.